In The 74th Anniversary Year Of The Assassination Of Great Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky A Tribute- DEFEATED, BUT UNBOWED-THE WRITINGS OF LEON TROTSKY, 1929-1940
BOOK REVIEW
If you are interested in the history of the International Left in the first half of the 20th century or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. I have reviewed elsewhere Trotsky’s writings published under the title The Left Opposition, 1923-1929 (in three volumes) dealing with Trotsky’s internal political struggles for power inside the Russian Communist Party (and by extension, the political struggles inside the Communist International) in order to save the Russian Revolution. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes in English of his writings from his various points of external exile from 1929 up until his death in 1940. These volumes were published by the organization that James P. Cannon, early American Communist Party and later Trotskyist leader founded, the Socialist Workers Party, during the 1970’s and 1980’s. (Cannon’s writings in support of Trotsky’s work are reviewed elsewhere in this space). Look in the archives in this space for other related reviews on and by this important world communist leader.
To set the framework for these reviews I will give a little personal, political and organizational sketch of the period under discussion. After that I will highlight some of the writings from each volume that are of continuing interest. Reviewing such compilations is a little hard to get a handle on as compared to single subject volumes of Trotsky’s writing but, hopefully, they will give the reader a sense of the range of this important revolutionary’s writings.
After the political defeat of the various Trotsky-led Left Oppositions 1923 to 1929 by Stalin and his state and party bureaucracy he nevertheless found it far too dangerous to keep Trotsky in Moscow. He therefore had Trotsky placed in internal exile at Ata Alma in the Soviet Far East in 1928. Even that turned out to be too much for Stalin’s tastes and in 1929 he arranged for the external exile of Trotsky to Turkey. Although Stalin probably rued the day that he did it this exile was the first of a number of places which Trotsky found himself in external exile. Other places included, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940. As these volumes, and many others from this period attest to, Trotsky continued to write on behalf of a revolutionary perspective. Damn, did he write. Some, including a few of his biographers, have argued that he should have given up the struggle, retired to who knows where, and acted the role of proper bourgeois writer or professor. Please! These volumes scream out against such a fate, despite the long odds against him and his efforts on behalf of international socialist revolution. Remember this is a revolutionary who had been through more exiles and prisons than one can count easily, held various positions of power and authority in the Soviet state and given the vicissitudes of his life could reasonably expect to return to power with a new revolutionary upsurge. Personally, I think Trotsky liked and was driven harder by the long odds.
The political prospects for socialist revolution in the period under discussion are, to say the least, rather bleak, or ultimately turned out that way. The post-World War I revolutionary upsurge has dissipated leaving Soviet Russia isolated. Various other promising revolutionary situations, most notably the aborted German revolution of 1923 that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution, had come to naught. In the period under discussion there is a real sense of defensiveness about the prospects for revolutionary change. The specter of fascism loomed heavily and we know at what cost to the international working class. The capitulation to fascism by the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties in 1933, the defeat of the heroic Austrian working class in 1934, the defeat in Spain in 1939, and the outlines of the impending Second World War colored all political prospects, not the least Trotsky’s.
Organizationally, Trotsky developed two tactical orientations. The first was a continuation of the policy of the Left Opposition during the 1920’s. The International Left Opposition as it cohered in 1930 still acted as an external and unjustly expelled faction of the official Communist parties and of the Communist International and oriented itself to winning militants from those organizations. After the debacle in Germany in 1933 a call for new national parties and a new, fourth, international became the organizational focus. Many of the volumes here contain letters, circulars, and manifestos around these orientations. The daunting struggle to create an international cadre and to gain some sort of mass base animate many of the writings collected in this series. Many of these pieces show Trotsky’s unbending determination to make a breakthrough. That these effort were, ultimately, militarily defeated during the course of World War Two does not take away from the grandeur of the efforts. Hats off to Leon Trotsky.
********
BOOK REVIEW
If you are interested in the history of the International Left in the first half of the 20th century or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the communist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. I have reviewed elsewhere Trotsky’s writings published under the title The Left Opposition, 1923-1929 (in three volumes) dealing with Trotsky’s internal political struggles for power inside the Russian Communist Party (and by extension, the political struggles inside the Communist International) in order to save the Russian Revolution. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes in English of his writings from his various points of external exile from 1929 up until his death in 1940. These volumes were published by the organization that James P. Cannon, early American Communist Party and later Trotskyist leader founded, the Socialist Workers Party, during the 1970’s and 1980’s. (Cannon’s writings in support of Trotsky’s work are reviewed elsewhere in this space). Look in the archives in this space for other related reviews on and by this important world communist leader.
To set the framework for these reviews I will give a little personal, political and organizational sketch of the period under discussion. After that I will highlight some of the writings from each volume that are of continuing interest. Reviewing such compilations is a little hard to get a handle on as compared to single subject volumes of Trotsky’s writing but, hopefully, they will give the reader a sense of the range of this important revolutionary’s writings.
After the political defeat of the various Trotsky-led Left Oppositions 1923 to 1929 by Stalin and his state and party bureaucracy he nevertheless found it far too dangerous to keep Trotsky in Moscow. He therefore had Trotsky placed in internal exile at Ata Alma in the Soviet Far East in 1928. Even that turned out to be too much for Stalin’s tastes and in 1929 he arranged for the external exile of Trotsky to Turkey. Although Stalin probably rued the day that he did it this exile was the first of a number of places which Trotsky found himself in external exile. Other places included, France, Norway and, finally, Mexico where he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940. As these volumes, and many others from this period attest to, Trotsky continued to write on behalf of a revolutionary perspective. Damn, did he write. Some, including a few of his biographers, have argued that he should have given up the struggle, retired to who knows where, and acted the role of proper bourgeois writer or professor. Please! These volumes scream out against such a fate, despite the long odds against him and his efforts on behalf of international socialist revolution. Remember this is a revolutionary who had been through more exiles and prisons than one can count easily, held various positions of power and authority in the Soviet state and given the vicissitudes of his life could reasonably expect to return to power with a new revolutionary upsurge. Personally, I think Trotsky liked and was driven harder by the long odds.
The political prospects for socialist revolution in the period under discussion are, to say the least, rather bleak, or ultimately turned out that way. The post-World War I revolutionary upsurge has dissipated leaving Soviet Russia isolated. Various other promising revolutionary situations, most notably the aborted German revolution of 1923 that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution, had come to naught. In the period under discussion there is a real sense of defensiveness about the prospects for revolutionary change. The specter of fascism loomed heavily and we know at what cost to the international working class. The capitulation to fascism by the German Communist and Social Democratic Parties in 1933, the defeat of the heroic Austrian working class in 1934, the defeat in Spain in 1939, and the outlines of the impending Second World War colored all political prospects, not the least Trotsky’s.
Organizationally, Trotsky developed two tactical orientations. The first was a continuation of the policy of the Left Opposition during the 1920’s. The International Left Opposition as it cohered in 1930 still acted as an external and unjustly expelled faction of the official Communist parties and of the Communist International and oriented itself to winning militants from those organizations. After the debacle in Germany in 1933 a call for new national parties and a new, fourth, international became the organizational focus. Many of the volumes here contain letters, circulars, and manifestos around these orientations. The daunting struggle to create an international cadre and to gain some sort of mass base animate many of the writings collected in this series. Many of these pieces show Trotsky’s unbending determination to make a breakthrough. That these effort were, ultimately, militarily defeated during the course of World War Two does not take away from the grandeur of the efforts. Hats off to Leon Trotsky.
********
In Honor Of Leon Trotsky On The 74th Anniversary
Of His Death- For Those Born After-Ivan Smirnov’s Journey
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Ivan Smirnov came out of old Odessa town, came out of the
Ukraine (not just plain Ukraine like now but “the” then), the good black earth
breadbasket of the Russian Empire, well before the turn of the 20th
century (having started life on some Mister’s farm begotten by illiterate but
worthy and hard-working peasant parents who were not sure whether it was 1880
or 1881 and Mister did not keep very good records up in the manor house)
although he was strictly a 20th century man by habits and
inclinations. Fashioned himself a man of the times, as he knew it, by
developing habits favored by those who liked to consider themselves modern. Those
habits included a love of reading, a love of and for the hard-pressed peoples
facing the jack-boot (like his struggling never- get-ahead parents) under the
Czar’s vicious rule, an abiding hatred for that same Czar, a hunger to see the
world or to see something more than wheat fields, and a love of politics, what
little expression that love could take even for a modern man stuck in a
backward semi-feudal country driven by the ruthless cops and General Staff
bayonets.
Of course Ivan Smirnov, a giant of a man, well over six
feet, more like six, two, well-build, solid, fairly muscular, with the Russian
dark eyes and hair to match, when he came of age also loved good food when he
had the money for such luxuries, loved to drink shots of straight vodka in
competition with his pals, and loved women, and women loved him. It is those
appetites in need of whetting that consumed his young manhood, his time in
Odessa before he signed on to the Czar’s navy to see the world, or at
least brush the dust of farmland Ukraine
and provincial Odessa off his shoes as the old saying went. Those loves trumped
for a time his people love (except helping out his parents with his wages), his
love of liberty but as we follow Ivan on his travels we will come to see that
those personal loves collided more and more with those larger loves.
So as we pick up the heart, the coming of age, coming of
political age, Ivan Smirnov story, he was no kid, had been around the block a
few times. Had taken his knocks on the land of his parents (really Mister’s
land once the taxes, rents, and dues were taken out) when he tried to organize,
well, not really organize but just put a petition of grievances, including the
elimination of rack-rents to Mister which was rejected out of hand and which subsequently
when Mister took his revenge forced him off the land. Forced him off under threat
to his life. The rack none too good for him heard in some quarters by Mister’s
lackeys and henchmen. He never forgot that slight, never. Never forgot that it
was Mister and his kind, his class and its hangers-on that took him away from
home, split his family up, pushed the rack-rent higher and finally killed off
his benighted father at an very early age in an age when early age was the norm.
So off he went to the city, and from there to the Black Sea Fleet and
adventure, or rather tedium mixed with adventure and plenty of time to read,
read novels, big Tolstoy-sided novels, novels for long sea-ward trips, when he
could and clandestinely radical political tracts.
Ivan also learned up close, made it his business to learn up
close, the why and wherefores of modern warfare, modern naval warfare. Knew too
that between the stifling old-fashioned naval bureaucracy and the shoddily
built ships (many with badly welded seams) some minor confrontation the Czar’s
navy was cooked. As things worked out
Ivan had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass kicked by the Japanese in
1904. He never called them “Nips” like lots of his crewmates did not after that
beating they took that did not have to happen if the damn Czar’s naval officers
had been anything but lackeys and anything but overconfident that they could
beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval war game. And so Ivan came of
war age and political age all at once. And the Russian navy was in shambles.
More importantly after that debacle he applied for, and was
eventually granted a transfer into in the Baltic fleet, the Czar’s jewel and
defender of citadel Saint Petersburg, headquartered at later famous Kronstadt, and
so he was in the swirl when the revolution of 1905 came thundering over their
heads and each man, each sailor, each officer had to choice sides. Most seaman
had gone over the rebels or stood on the sidelines, the officers mainly played
possum with the Czar. He had gone wholehearted with rebels and while he did not
face the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin
his naval career was over. That was where his love of reading from an early age
came in, came and made him aware of the boiling kettle of political groupings
trying to save Russia or to save what some class or part of a class had an
interest in saving Russia for their own purposes. He knew, knew from his dismal
experience on the land, that Mister fully intended to keep what was his come
hell or high water. He also knew that Mister’s people, the peasantry like his
family would have a very hard time, a very hard time indeed bucking Mister’s
interests and proclaiming their own right to the land all by themselves. Hadn’t
he also been burned, been hunted down like a cur over a simple petition.
So Ivan from the first dismissed the Social Revolutionary
factions and gave some thought to joining the Social Democrats. Of course being
Russians who would argue over anything from how many angels could fit on the
head of a needle to theories of capitalist surplus value that party
organization had split into two factions (maybe more when the dust settled).
When word came back from Europe he had sided with the Mensheviks and their more
realistic approach to what was possible for Russia in the early 20th
century. That basic idea of a bourgeois democratic republic was the central
notion that Ivan Smirnov held for a while, a long while, and which he took in
with him once things got hot in Saint Petersburg in January of 1905.
That January after the Czar’s troops, his elite bloody
Cossack troops in the lead, fired on (and sabre-slashed) an unarmed procession
led by a priest, damn a Russian Orthodox priest, a people’s priest who led the
icon-filled procession to petition the Czar to resolve grievances, great and
small, Ivan Smirnov, stationed out in the Baltic Fleet then after the
reorganization of the navy in the wake of the defeat by the Japanese the year
before had an intellectual crisis. He knew that great things were going to
unfold in Russia as it moved into the modern age. He could see the modern age
tied to the ancient agrarian
age every time he had leave and headed for Saint Petersburg with its sailors’
delights, the taverns, music halls, and whorehouses of which Ivan usually took
his full measure. (Being sea-bound he was a proverbially “girl in every port
guy” although he had had one short serious affair with a girl student from the
university, a left-Social Revolutionary who had never been outside the city in
her life) He could see in the city within a city, the Vyborg district, the
growing working-class district made up of fresh recruits from the farms looking
for higher wages, some excitement and a future.
That was why he had
discarded the Social Revolutionaries so quickly when in an earlier generation
he might very well have been a member of People’s Will or some such
organization. He had that kind of heart, the heart of a warrior –avenger with
the cool calculation of the average ward-healer. No, his intellectual crisis
did not come from that quarter but rather that split in the workers’ party
which had happened in 1903 far from Russia among the émigré intellectuals around
the question of what kind and how much activity qualified an activists as a party
member. He had sided with the “softs,” the Mensheviks, mainly because he liked
their leader, Julius Martov, better than Lenin. Lenin and his
faction seemed more intent on gaining organizational control, had more
hair-splitters which he hated, and were more [CL1] wary of the peasants
even though both factions swore faith in the democratic republic for Russia and
to the international social democracy. He had sided with the “softs” although
he saw a certain toughness in the Bolshevik cadre that he admired. But that
year, that 1905 year, had started him on a very long search for revolutionary
direction.
The year 1905 moreover had started filled with promise after
that first blast from the Czarist reaction. The masses were able to gather in a
Duma that was at least half responsible to the people, or to the people’s
representatives. At least that is what those people’s representatives claimed.
More importantly in the working class districts, and among his fellow sailors
who more likely than not, unlike himself, were from some strata of the working
class had decided to set up their own representative organs, the workers’
councils, or in the Russian parlance which has come down in the history books, the soviets. These in 1905,
unlike in 1917, were seen as supplementary to other political organizations. A
pressure group not a central contender for power. As the arc of the year curved though there
were signs that the Czarist reaction was gathering steam. Ivan had then had trouble
organizing his fellow sailors to action. The officers of his ship, The Falcon, were challenging more
decisions by the sailors’ committee. The Potemkin
affair brought things to a head in the fleets. Finally, after the successes of
the Saint Petersburg Soviet under the flaming revolutionary Leon Trotsky that
organ was suppressed and the reaction set in that would last until many years
later, many tough years for political oppositionists of all stripes. Needless
to say that while Ivan was spared the bulk of the reprisals once the Czarist
forces regained control his career in the navy was effectively finished and
when his enlistment was up he left the service.
Just as well Ivan that things worked out as they did he had thought
many times since then because he was then able to come ashore and get work on
the docks through some connections, and think. Think and go about the business
of everyday life like marriage to a woman, non-political but a comfort, whom he
met through one of his fellow workers on the Neva quay and who would share his
home and life although not always understanding that part of his life or him
and his determination to break Russia from the past. In those days after 1905,
the dogs days as everybody agreed, when the Czar’s Okhrana was everywhere and
ready to snatch anyone with any oppositional signs Ivan mostly thought and
read, kept a low profile, did as was found out later after the revolution in
1917, a lot of low-level underground organizing among the dockworkers and
factory workers of the Vyborg district. In other words developing himself and
those around him as cadre for what these few expected would be the great awakening.
But until the break-out Lena River gold-workers strike in 1912 those were
indeed dog days.
And almost as quickly as the dog days of the struggle were
breaking up the war clouds over Europe were increasing. Every civilized nation
was impatiently arming to the teeth to defend its civilization against the
advancing hordes pitched at the door. Ivan could sense in his still sturdy
peasant-bred bones that that unfinished task from 1905, that fight for the land
and the republic, hell maybe the eight-hour day too, was going to come to a
head. He knew enough too about the state of the navy, and more importantly, now
the army through his organizing contacts to know that without some quick
decisive military action the monarchy was finished and good riddance. The hard
part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future peasant conscripts who
would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought out land –grabbing adventures
to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly head-long into the Czar’s
arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there was plenty of work to do.
Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a kid. Glad he had learned enough to earn a hearing,
to spread the word. To get people moving when the time for action came.
As the war clouds came to a head after the killing of the
archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his
bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to
the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal
was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West,
Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the
Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the
other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan
hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the
Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had
definitely separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war
fever just because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that
the party wished to emulate in Russia.
He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the
Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was
happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the
bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young
workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms
from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible.
Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committeemen in Russia and among their
Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yes this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s
tunnel vision, with great events working in the world.
Jesus, thought Ivan once the Czar declared his allegiance to
the Entente, once he had gotten the Duma to rubber-stamp his war budget (except
for a remnant of the Bolsheviks who were subsequently relieved of immunity and readied
for Siberian exile), he could not believe that Plekhanov, the great Plekhanov, the
father of the Marxist movement in Russia and mentor to the likes of Lenin,
Martov, Dan, hell even flea-bitten free-lancer Trotsky, had declared for the
Czar for the duration and half of Ivan’s own bloody Menshevik party had
capitulated (the other half, the leadership half had been in exile anyway, or
out of the country for some reason) this was going to be hell.
There would be no short war here, no quick victory over the
land hungry Huns, nothing but the stench of death filling the air overcoming
all those mobilization parades and the thrown flowers, the kissed girls, the
shots of vodka to fortify the boys for the run to the front. The Czar’s house,
double eagles and all, was a house of cards or rather of sawdust like those
villages old rascal Potemkin put up to fool Catherine in her time. Most of the
peasant boys marching to the front these days would never see Mother Russia
again, never get to smell the good Russian earth. But if he had anything to say
about it those who survived, those who would have to listen if not now then
sometime, would have their own piece of good Russian earth unlike their fathers
who toiled on the land for Mister’s benefit for nothing. And went to early
graves like his father.
And so in the summer of 1914 as if led by blinders Europe,
along with solid phalanxes of its farm boys and factory workers, went to bloody
stalemated war.
Went without Ivan just that minute declared too old to fight
and relegated to the home guard. There would come a day, a day not too long in
the future when the “recruiting sergeants” would be gobbling up the “too old to
fights,” like Ivan, the lame and the halt, any man breathing to fill the
depleted trenches on the Eastern front. By then though Ivan would have already
clamored to get into the ranks, get in to spread the new wave message about the
meaningless of the fight for the workingman and the peasant and that the fight
was at home not out in the trenches. But that was for the future, the music of
the future. Ironically Ivan’s unit wound up guarding the Peter and Paul
Fortress for the Czar. The same place
that would see plenty of action when the time for action came.
The home guard was a loose operation, especially in Saint
Petersburg, which entailed not much more than showing up for guard duty when
the rotation called your turn and an occasion drill or assembly. The rest of
the time, or most of it, Ivan spent reading, reading clandestinely the sporadic
anti-war materials that were being smuggled in from various point in Europe by
whatever still free exiles groups had enough gall and funds to put together
those first crude sheets proclaiming the new dispensation. Ivan had time to
think too during those first eighteen months or so of war. Thought about how
right he had been that this “glorious little war” would not be over soon, would
devour the flower of the European youth and if enough lived long enough change
the face of half-monarchial Europe. Thought about how, when, and where street
organizers like him (he admitted long ago that he was not a “theory man) would
get a chance to change the awful slaughter and the daily casualty lists.
Ivan through all of early 1916 thought too that things
within his own Menshevik organization needed serious upgrading, needed to be
readied if the nation was to turn from semi-feudal monarchy to the modern
republic which would provide the jumping off point to agitate for the social
republic of the organization’s theory, and of his youthful dreams. Although he
was no theory man he was beginning to see that the way the bourgeoisie, native
and foreign, lined up it was as likely as not that they would not follow
through, would act even worse than in 1905 when they went hat in hand with the
Czar for the puny no account Duma and a few reforms that in the end only
benefitted them to the exclusion of the masses. He began to see Lenin’s point,
if it was Lenin’s and not some Okhrana forgery, that the new parties, the
parties that had not counted before, the peasant and worker parties, would have
to lead the way. There was no other way. And no, no thank you he was not a
Trotsky man, a wild man who believed that things had changed some much in the
20th century that the social republic for Russia was on the agenda
right away. No, he could not wrap his head around that idea, not in poor, not
in now wounded and fiercely bleeding and benighted Mother Russia. Beside
Trotsky was living off his reputation in the 1905 revolution, was known to be
mightier with the pen than the sword and a guy whom the main leadership of the
Mensheviks thought was a literary dilettante (strange characterization though
in an organization with plenty of odd-ball characters who could not find a home
with the Bolsheviks and were frightened to death of working with the mass
peasant parties being mostly city folk).
He thought too about the noises, and they were only noises
just then, exile noises mostly that the Bolsheviks had had a point in opposing
the war budget in the Duma, those who had not deserted the party for the Czar
in the patriotic build-up, and who had been sent to Siberia for their
opposition. He admired such men and knew slightly one of the deportees who had
represented one of the Vyborg worker districts in the capital in the Duma. Now
word had come back from Europe that a small congress held in some no-name
village in the Alps (Zimmerwald in Switzerland as he later found out) had
declared for international peace among the workers and oppressed of all nations
and that it was time to stop the fighting and bleeding. More ominously Lenin
and his henchmen had come out for waging a civil war against one’s own
government to stop the damn thing, and to start working on that task now. Worse
Lenin was calling for a new international socialist organization to replace the
battered Socialist International. To
Ivan’s practical mind this was sheer madness and he told whatever Bolshevik
committeemen he could buttonhole (in deepest privacy since the Czarist
censorship and his snitches were plentiful).
In Ivan’s mind they were still the wild boys, seemingly on principle,
and he vigorously argued with their committeemen to keep their outlandish anti-war
positions quiet for now while the pro-war hysteria was still in play. But deep
down he was getting to see where maybe the Bolsheviks, maybe Lenin, hell maybe
even goof Trotsky were right-this war would be the mother of invention for the
next revolutionary phase.
The Czar has abdicated, the Czar has abdicated, the new
republic is proclaimed! The whirl of early 1917 dashed through Ivan Smirnov’s
head. A simple demonstration and strike by women in the capital after the
bloodletting of over two years of war, after the defeats of 1905 and later
showed the monarchy, the now laughable double-eagle monarchy that held the
masses in thrall for centuries was shown to be a house of cards, no, less, a
house of sawdust blown away with the wind. While Ivan had not caught the early
drift of the agitation and aggravation out in the worker neighborhoods he had
played an honorable part in the early going. And the reason that Ivan had
missed some of the early action was for the simple reason that Ivan’s home
guard unit, the 27th Regiment, had been mobilized for the Silesian
front in early 1917 and had been awaiting orders to move out when all hell
broke loose.
This is where the honorable part came in. The 27th
Regiment had been fortified to a division with remnants of other front-line divisions
whose casualty levels were so high that they were no longer effectively
fighting units. As the units meshed and the action in the capital got intense
two quick decisions needed to be made by the 27th –would the unit go
to the front as ordered by the General Staff and subsequently would the unit
still stationed in Saint Petersburg defend the Czarist monarchy then in peril.
Now this new unit, this of necessity haphazard and un-centered unit, was made
up of the likes of Ivan (although none so political or known to be political)
and of disillusioned and bedraggled peasant boys back from the front who just
wanted to go home and farm the land of their fathers, for Mister or for
themselves it did not matter. And that is where Ivan Smirnov, of peasant parents
born, came center stage and made his mark. Ivan when it came time to speak
about whether they would go to the front argued that going to the front meant
in all probability that if they went that they would farm no land, Mister’s or
their own since they would be dead. And some other peasant boy would come along
to farm the ancient family lands.
Ivan did not need to evoke the outlandish theories of Lenin
and Trotsky about civil war and the social republic but just say that simple
statement and the unit voted almost unanimously to stay in the capital (those
who did not go along as always in such times kept quiet and did not vote to
move out). Of course as always at such times as well Ivan’s good and
well-earned reputation among the home guard members for prudent but forceful
actions when the time was right helped carry the day. That reputation, borne of
many years of street organizing and other work, also came in handy when the 27th
was ordered to defend the Czar in the streets. Again Ivan hammered home the point
that there would be no land, no end of the bloody war, no end of dying in some
forsaken trenches if the Czar stayed. The 27th would not defend the
Czar to the death (again the doubters and Czarist agents kept mum).
And for Ivan’s honorable service, for his honorable past,
when it came time to send delegates to the soviet, or the soldiers’ section of
the soviet (the other two sections being the workers and the peasants with
everybody else who adhered to the soviet concept filling in one of those three
sections) Ivan was unanimously elected to represent the 27th Regiment.
Now this soviet idea (really just Russian for council, workers councils mainly)
was nothing new, had been created in the heat of the 1905 revolution and had
been in the end the key governmental form of the opposition then. Now with the
Czar gone (and as our story moves on the government is in non-Czarist agents
hands) there were two centers of power- the bourgeois ministry (including representatives
of some worker and peasant parties) and the soviets acting as watchdogs and
pressure groups over the ministry. As Russian spring turned to summer Ivan from
his post in the Soviet saw some things that disturbed him, saw that “pretty
boy” Trotsky (who had just gotten back from American exile as had Lenin a bit
earlier) and now damn Lenin had begun to proclaim the need for the social
republic right then. Not in some few years future but then. But he was also
disturbed by the vacuous actions of his Mensheviks on the land question and on
social legislation. As the summer heat came Ivan began to see that defending
the people’s revolution was tough business and that some hard twists and turns
were just waiting ahead for him.
Jesus, Ivan said to
himself as summer turned to early Russian fall when is that damn Kerensky going
to pull us out of the war after that foolish summer offensive ordered by who
knows who collapsed and made Russia look ridiculous to the world, our ragged
starving troops are melting away from the trenches, his own 27th had
repeatedly been called up to the front and then mysteriously at the last moment
held back to defend something. Who knows what the General Staff had planned
after Kornilov’s uprising was halted in it tracks (everybody in the private
drinking rooms laughed at the fact that Kornilov could not move his troops step
one once the Soviet told the trainmen to halt all troop transfers). See here
was the deal, the new democratic deal. Now that Russia was a democracy, weak as
it was, it was now patriotic no matter what that madman Trotsky said, no matter
what the man with the organization Lenin said, the brutal Hun must be defeated
by the now harmonious democracies.
Bullshit (or the Russian equivalent) said Ivan when a part
of his own party swallowed that line, went along for the ride. Lenin was
calling from the rooftops (in his Finnish hideout once old Kerensky put a price
on his head, wanted to smoke the old bald-headed bastard out and bring him to
trial for treason if he could) for a vote of “no confidence” in the ministry. Both
were beginning to call for the soviets to do more than express worker, soldier,
and peasant anger and to stop acting as a pressure valve for Kerensky and his
band of fools and take the power to change things into its own hands. And that
madman Trotsky was proclaiming the same thing from his prison cell at the Peter
and Paul where a remnant of the 27th was still doing guard duty (and
standing in awe of a real revolutionary giving him unheard of privileges). Meanwhile Ivan, Ivan Smirnov, the voice of the
27th, the well-respected voice of the peasant soldier, was twisting
in the wind. There was no way forward with Kerensky, the mere tool of the
British and French imperialists who were holding him on a tight string. But
Ivan could not see where poor, bloody, beleaguered and drawn Mother Russia, his
earthen Russia could move forward with the radicals who were beginning to
clamor for heads, and for peace and land too.
Jesus, cried Ivan the Bolsheviks have this frosty October
day proclaimed the social republic, have declared that the war over in the East
(or that they were prepared to sue for peace with whomever would meet them at
the table and if not then they would go it alone). Ivan had heard that it might
be peace at any price in order to get the new order some breathing room. But
peace. Necessary peace if Russia was not to lose all its able-bodied men for
the next two generations. The longed for
peace that Ivan had spent his underground existence propagandizing for. Ivan
already knew as a soldier delegate to the Soviet that the trenches had been and
were at that moment being emptied out by land-hungry peasant soldiers, his
peasant soldiers who heard that there would be “land to the tiller” and they
wanted to till land not be under it. Ivan’s old call was being taken up by the
damn Bolsheviks who sent out a land decree as a first order of business once
they dumped the Kerensky ministry, once they flushed out the Winter Palace of all
the old deadwood. All kinds of things were being proposed (and sometimes
accepted even when the human and material wherewithal were non-existent which
worried Ivan to perdition).
But here is the funny part. Although Ivan had lined himself
up with Martov’s Left Mensheviks (those who wanted peace and some kind of
vibrant bourgeois democracy to pressure forward into the social republic) in
the Soviet for most of the summer and fall he kept getting incessant news from
the 27th that they were ready to mutiny against the Kerensky
ministry, they had had enough and wanted to go home. Ivan was twisting in the
wind. He saw that the idea of the social republic was being presented too soon,
that the resources were not there to give the experiment a chance (who knows
what outside force would come to the aid of the Soviets and when). But he also knew
that right that moment the old ways could not relieve the impasse. And so he
broke ranks with Martov and his group, did not walk out when the voting did not
go the way Martov wanted. In fact when the division of the house was called
Ivan Smirnov, longtime political foe of the madman Trotsky and scarred opponent
of the damn Leninists (he had not heard that Trotsky had quietly joined the
Bolsheviks earlier), voted for peace, voted for the land distribution. The new
day had come and there would be hell to pay and he would not join the
Bolsheviks, no way, but in for a dime in for a dollar and he would defend the
Soviet power as best he could.
“Petrograd must be
defended to the last man, everyone to their posts, no Whites must get to the
city itself,” cried Political Commisssar Ivan Smirnov now that the Red Army (or
rather one of the Red armies since between the internally diverse White Guard
forces, their foreign imperialist backers and the vastness of Mother Russia
there were several fluid fronts and battles raging at any given time) had its
back to the wall and the working-class capital of the worlds’ only workers’
state in existence was threatened by Cossacks and other forces. It had come to
this, come to this as Ivan always knew it would, the forces of the past would
not let go without a bloody fight (even if the actual seizure of power by the
Soviets in October 1917 had been relatively bloodless), would scream bloody
murder about the land (the land that he had come off of at the turn of the
century), about the factories and about the very fact that the fellahin of the
world had decided to take matters into their own hands. Ivan had sworn once the
heads had been counted back in that cold October of 1917 that he was in the
fight to the finish (in for a dime, in for a dollar as the expression when
then), or until he had lain his head down from some stray bullet.
And it had almost come to that at Kazan in that desperate
struggle to hold Russia together before the Czech Legions that were marauding
their ways back from Siberia took the city and cut Russia into not much more
than a small province. Trotsky himself, then risen to War Commissar with
extraordinary powers had organized the fight, had put every resource at hand
(on that famous train that he rode through most of the civil war) and in the
fierce river battles before Kazan some sniper had popped Ivan in the shoulder
just above the heart. That seemed like years before as he now helped prepare
the defense of the capital. There had even been talk that Trotsky himself was
coming through to boost morale (and to die like Ivan and many others defending
the city street by street if need be. It was that perilous.). Yes, Ivan had
come a long way since those October days when he swore his oath. Of course a
military cadre like Ivan was hand-picked to move away from the placid Soviet parliamentary
job and into the yawning gap that needed filling of cadre who could fight and
give reason to the fight. And so Ivan, grown old in the previous two years, had
worked his way up to division commissar in the days when political reliability
meant-for or against the revolution, arms in hand. He had not, despite many
attempts by the Bolsheviks, joined the party (now called Communist harkening
back to Marx’s time). Yet there he was steadying the nerves of the raw recruits
from the factories in front of him. No the Whites would not pass, not while the
Ivan Smirnovs of the world drew breathe.
Finally, finally the Whites were being pushed back, the revolution,
the red revolution appeared to be saved after many losses, after the carnage of
the world war, after three years of civil war, the worst kind. Ivan Smirnov,
political commissar of the 5th Army, had done more than his fair
share of bringing in that result (including organizing and fighting, arms in
hand, before Petrograd when that city was threatened by the Whites. Hell, even
Trotsky himself went crazy in defense of the revolution during that action
rallying the troops personally like some whirling dervish). He had even received
the Order of the Red Banner personally from Trotsky for his heroic action. But
now in the year 1921 Ivan was ready, more than ready, to take his place in the
struggle to bring socialism to Russia as a civilian as fast as possible.
Still as he pondered the future Ivan was anxious for his
Mother Russia alone in the world as a workers’ state with no prospects that he
could see in sight. Still had, despite increasingly insistent requests, held off
from joining the Communist Party (Joseph Stalin himself, at Lenin’s personal request,
had delivered the message along with the lure of high position). One thing
about Ivan Smirnov was that he was a man of his word, had sworn to defend the revolution
come hell or high water once he broke with his Left Menshevik friends and voted
for the soviet power back in fateful October (old calendar) 1917. He would not
desert the revolution with so much work to be done although he still insisted
on remaining outside the party in order to have room to criticize what he did
not like, have room to speak for his peasant brethren to the powers that be.
And so Ivan, as he readied to demobilize himself, after the general
demobilization of the red armies needed now at the factory and farm fronts,
decided that he would take that lesser position in the commissariat of
agriculture when he paperwork was completed. Ah, civilian life, he murmured to
his wife whom he had seen infrequently the past few years but who had kept his houses
in order during the chaos of the bloody civil wars. Civilian life indeed.
